Improving on ONE thing (a 30-Day Creator Challenge excerpt)

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Dear reader,

Yesterday we talked about why comparing yourself with others isn’t helpful. What can be helpful, though, is comparing yourself with your past self. Well, to be more precise: it can help to compare your current work with your past work.

(Because you are not your work. But that’s a topic for later.)

So let’s take a look at what you’ve created in the past four days and what you might improve on.

Now, you could spend hours analyzing every single thing you could do better and then spend hours more planning improvements. If you have the time to do that and to create today, that’s great. But it’s not worth analyzing what you’ve already created at the expense of creating more.

In other words:

🚨Do not use learning as an excuse for not doing the work. 🚨

Only think about what you can improve on if you will also actually create a thing today. Because the goal is still to build your habit of putting out content every day.

With that said, let’s talk a little about improving.

See, if you’re like me, you always like to get better at things. And yesterday we talked about the importance of incremental improvement: getting a little bit better every time adds up to big gains eventually.

So let’s pick one thing to improve on compared with what you’ve created in the past four days. To find out what’s the best thing to improve on, try this:

Share what you made with three people and ask them to name the #1 thing they think you could do better.

Ideally, two or more of them will mention the same thing.

If they do, see if you can improve on that without spending too much time and effort. For example, if people suggest that the lighting in your videos isn’t great, you could shoot today’s video in bright daylight. Don’t buy professional camera lights, though—now’s not the time for that.

If you get three different suggestions, just pick any one to improve on. Randomly. Don’t spend much time choosing.

If people don’t have good suggestions, let me give you some pointers:

Is there a structure to what you create? Is there a beginning, a middle, and an end?

Can people understand you easily? (Is your writing grammatically solid and without typos? Is the audio on your videos or podcast episodes good, or is there lots of background noise?)

Does the title of your article/video/episode match the content?

Is it clear why someone might find your creation interesting? (More on this later on in the challenge.)

These are just suggestions. You do not need to think about these things all at once. Like I said, pick one thing to improve on, and only if you have the time to think about that and create a thing today.

Either way, I’d love to see what you created today. If you’ve tried to improve on a specific thing, let me know.